Crick and Watson Did Not Steal Franklin's Data

"In a full description of the structure in a paper submitted in August 1953 and published in 1954, Crick and Watson did attempt to set the record straight17. They acknowledged that, without Franklin’s data, “the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible”, and implicitly referred to the MRC report as a “preliminary report” in which Franklin and Wilkins had “independently suggested that the basic structure of the paracrystalline [B] form is helical and contains two intertwined chains”."

What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5

Wait, I looked this up once. Wasn't Rosalind Franklin's paper published back to back with the two other papers in the same issue of Nature?

https://www.mskcc.org/teaser/1953-nature-papers-watson-crick...

Yes, yes it was: Watson& Crick on page 737; Wikins, Stokes, Wilson on page 738; and Franklin, Gosling on page 740.

The record WAS straight in 1953. I am so confused.

It's not in this article, but I have a vague recollection from other discussions that the actual x-ray diffraction image was taken by one of Franklin's graduate students.

Ironically the "drama" narrative which was constructed much later making for a good story to tell could have been avoided right from the start.

Just three weeks after the publications in Nature (April 1953), a Time journalist Joan Bruce was made aware of the hottest story in science and described the discovery in her nearly publication-ready article (professional photoshoots of Watson/Crick were already taken, yes one of those pictures [0] was consequently prominently featured in The Double Helix 15 years (!) later) as a joint effort of two teams (Wilkins/Franklin & Watson/Crick) but the story was killed because apparently among other consulted scientists Franklin herself found the science lacking, it wasn't revised and subsequently no article was published at the time. No pun intended.

> Three weeks after the three DNA papers were published in Nature, Bragg gave a lecture on the discovery at Guy’s Hospital Medical School in London, which was reported on the front page of the British News Chronicle daily newspaper. This drew the attention of Joan Bruce, a London journalist working for Time. Although Bruce’s article has never been published — or described by historians, until now — it is notable for its novel take on the discovery of the double helix.

Bruce portrayed the work as being done by “two teams”: one, consisting of Wilkins and Franklin, gathering experimental evidence using X-ray analysis; “the other” comprising Watson and Crick, working on theory. To a certain extent, wrote Bruce, the teams worked independently, although “they linked up, confirming each other’s work from time to time, or wrestling over a common problem”. For example, Watson and Crick had “started to work on the double helix theory as a result of Wilkins’ X-rays”. Conversely, she wrote, Franklin was “checking the Cavendish model against her own X-rays, not always confirming the Cavendish structural theory”. It has not escaped our notice that both examples render Franklin in a position of strength, every bit a peer of Wilkins, Crick and Watson.

Unfortunately, Bruce was not so strong on the science. Her article got far enough for Time to send a Cambridge photographer, Anthony Barrington Brown, to shoot portraits of Watson and Crick, and for Watson to tell his friends to watch for it. But it never appeared, perhaps because Franklin told Bruce that it needed an awful lot of work to get the science straight. Bruce’s take on the discovery was buried, and Barrington Brown’s compelling images disappeared until Watson resurrected the best of them 15 years later, for The Double Helix.

It is tantalizing to think how people might remember the double-helix story had Bruce’s article been published, suitably scientifically corrected. From the outset, Franklin would have been represented as an equal member of a quartet who solved the double helix, one half of the team that articulated the scientific question, took important early steps towards a solution, provided crucial data and verified the result. Indeed, one of the first public displays of the double helix, at the Royal Society Conversazione in June 1953, was signed by the authors of all three Nature papers. In this early incarnation, the discovery of the structure of DNA was not seen as a race won by Watson and Crick, but as the outcome of a joint effort.

According to journalist Horace Freeland Judson and Franklin’s biographer, Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin has been reduced to the “wronged heroine” of the double helix. She deserves to be remembered not as the victim of the double helix, but as an equal contributor to the solution of the structure.[1][2]

[0]https://wellcomecollection.org/works/s9z3dhkn/items

[1]https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01313-5

[2]https://x.com/matthewcobb/status/1650877656445988864

A puff piece on Crick from a guy who wrote a book trying to white wash Crick? What a surprise.

I believe that Rosalind Franklin didn't take the photo in question. My understanding is that it was done by her grad student, Raymond Gosling.

Certainly if we're arguing about giving credit where it's due, we should mention his name. Perhaps even put it in the headline?

When there is an effort to “elevate people of type X” you have to suspect that some large number of those “elevations” are fraudulent rewriting of history. I immediately ignore the whole lot.

Peek just a little bit behind the curtain and it always turns out the controversy is fake.

Pretty much the normal version of history has been accurate for a while.